Plugin Update

A new version of the O3D plug-in (0.1.42) is now on its way! This release contains a few bug fixes along with some exciting new functionality including more flexible ways for manipulating image data via the new Bitmap object and support for Data URLs both for reading back the contents of the render buffer and for creating Raw Data buffers. For more details on what's included with this release, please take a look at our Release Notes. As always, if you are an existing O3D user, your plug-in will be updated automatically soon, but if you just can't wait, you can go to our home page and install it manually.

An interesting bit of trivia here is that this is likely the last release we'll make using our old build system. We now have all the pieces in place to switch our build over from scons to GYP. As you can imagine, switching build systems mid-flight in a product the size of O3D can be fairly challenging, but it looks like most of the hard work is now behind us. Switching to the new build system was a necessary step for getting O3D integrated into Chrome, but it also provides some additional benefits to developers who work with the O3D source code. GYP will generate native project files (Visual Studio on Windows and XCode on the Mac) which makes the edit/compile/debug cycle a lot faster than before. In addition, we'll soon be exposing our Buildbot-based continuous build system to everyone so that you can monitor the build progress in real time and even pick up binaries built from the top of our trunk! Stay tuned for detailed instructions.

As always, we appreciate your support and comments. Please continue using the o3d-discuss group for sending your feedback and questions and the o3d issue tracker for filing bugs.

Posted by Vangelis Kokkevis, O3D Team